Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

The American Psychological Association list achieving goals daily as one of the 10 most important factors for building resilience. Specifically they state:

Like building a muscle, increasing your resilience takes time and intentionality…To increase your capacity for resilience…use these strategies…

…Move toward your goals. Develop some realistic goals. Do something regularly — even if it seems like a small accomplishment — that enables you to move toward your goals. Instead of focusing on tasks that seem unachievable, ask yourself, “What’s one thing I know I can accomplish today that helps me move in the direction I want to go?”

In addition to building resilience, I’m a firm believer that achieving goals daily is also the key to achieving long term goals. As a result of these two benefits, defining multiple small attainable daily goals that represent the elements of measurable progress for your long term goals should be a top priority. In order to do this, I recommend a 6 step process.

1. Break down the activities or skills required to progress towards your long term goal into 3 or 4 essentials.
2. Identify the things that correlate directly with these essentials that come easy to you because you either enjoy it or because it’s effortless (your strengths).
3. Identify the activities or skills that correlate directly with these essentials that don’t come easy to you because you don’t enjoy it or because you find it difficult (your weaknesses).
4. Create a daily routine that incorporates one or more of your strengths from #2.
5. Create three different weekly routines to be done on three different days that leverage your strengths from #2 in a way that helps your overcome the most essential weakness from #3.
6. Finally, create a monthly routine to measure progress, get feedback from outside mentors, and make adjustments.